In November of 2016, I discussed a then new report indicating that “at least 100,000 people in America each year plead guilty to drug charges supported by police-conducted drug field tests that do not reliably indicate whether a substance tested is an illegal drug.” This problem has persisted in the years since, as I have addressed in reports in January of 2019 on the continuing use of the faulty tests to justify arrests and in October of 2021 on the faulty tests also being used in jails and prisons as a reason to impose enhanced restrictions on inmates.
Here is an update. In March, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed into law legislation (HB 26-1020) that directs police to issue a summons instead of make an arrest for certain instances of drug possession when such a drug field test is used. It also requires courts to inform defendants, before defendants enter a plea, that the tests have a known error rate, that the tests are inadmissibility in court, and that the defendant has the right to request testing from a forensics laboratory. “The first-of-its-kind law,” wrote C.J. Ciaramella in a Friday Reason article that discusses the new Colorado law in detail, “is part of a growing bipartisan recognition of a problem that news investigations and lawsuits have documented for years: Police officers’ use of unverified drug field tests is inevitably resulting in innocent people being arrested, jailed, and prosecuted.”
